My first full-time teaching job was as a sociology instructor at Career U. Unlike other career schools, this one actually gave me freedom to design my own Intro to Sociology courses—certainly not the norm at most career schools. I met some pretty cool students in those classes, and we did good work. My job helped to promote critical thinking among the students.
Hooray for me!
So this week’s class reading, Gayatri Spivak’s essay “Teaching for the Times,” was quite jarring. In this essay, Spivak writes:
Proctor and Gamble, a large U.S. multinational corporation, sends students specializing in business administration abroad to learn language and culture. Already in 1990, the National Governors’ Association report queried: “How are we to sell our products in a global economy when we are yet to learn the language of the customers” . . . We are caught in a larger struggle where one side devises newer ways to exploit transnationality through a distorting culturalism and the other knows rather what transnational script drives, writes, and operates it. [emphasis hers]
I’ve been reflecting on my role in this transnational script, on how the classes I taught over those past three years at Career U were actually in service of this “distorting culturalism.” How many students eventually went on to use their knowledge in service of the various Proctor and Gambles?
Towards making globalization palatable to people in the Third World, the very people who would also be made to shoulder the resulting devastation?
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It’s easy to harp on the career universities and for-profit institutions. But this has long been happening in the community colleges where I teach, in the R1 where I work and study. There are business and finance students in our ethnic studies classes, who see [insert ethnic or racial group here] communities as the next great untapped market.
There are students taking Asian American and Asian history courses to market themselves to multinationals. And because these courses increase their chances of getting into law or business schools.
There’s the publications spawned from the various research centers, with their non-transparent funding.
Hey, at least the for-profit universities are honest about their corporatism.
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This post was initially titled Colonialism, because I want to explore the various ways that institutions like the academe, development organizations, and yes, even the blogosphere shore up colonialist discourse. And I’m still thinking about those. But optimist that I am, let’s focus on the possibilities for ruptures.
It’s been more than a decade since I read Freire, and I remember how fired up I was about the transformative power of education, about education being the “practice of freedom.”
I have seen snippets of critical pedagogy in action. Not a lot, but enough to keep me hopeful. One that stands out was a class on Asian American women that I TA-ed. Majority of the students signed up to fulfill course credits, dreading what they expected to be an indoctrination from an “angry woman professor.” What they got was an instructor who was developing her own ideas on Asian American feminist epistemology, so she came into the class as both a teacher and a learner.
It’s hard to describe in writing just how well she ran the class. She rarely used the term “feminism” except in reference to liberal feminism. And through pedagogical techniques such as situated knowledge and standpoint exercises, she pushed these pre-med and pre-law students to critically evaluate feminist theory from their own lives as Asian Americans and Asian American women. To think about how much these theories address, and about aspects of their lives that the theories do not even recognize. Some final papers showed a rudimentary grasp of feminism and womanism, while others went beyond that to grapple with how being women and Asian Americans positions them socially and professionally. In their evaluations, students wrote of being surprised, disturbed, and profoundly moved by the class and the instructor.
I still struggle to really understand critical pedagogy, how courses like women’s studies and ethnic studies could move beyond preaching to the choir, and really serve to center education in a wider democratic process.
But what else do you do? Spivak reminds those in women’s studies that we’re no longer oppositional scholars, that we’re very already much caught up in the transnational script of capital. It’s really a matter of deciding what kind of script that you want to help write.
What a wonderful post! I too struggle with these questions, and am influenced by the work of Spivak and Freire. In fact, when I left the US nine months ago for India, I brought one book with me: The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It’s such a humbling and challenging read. I’ve read it twice and have it sitting at my desk as a constant reminder of my standpoint and for reference when I am feeling confused or stuck in my work.
The issues that you bring up about the ways that corporations are utilizing critical theory and area studies in order to exploit countries in the Global South is deep, and it’s for real. And it reminds us that most anything can be co-opted for nefarious purposes. And that there is no end to the need for creative resistance.
hi! whats career U?
there’s another Spivak work on pedagogy; this time on the teaching of literature. It’s “Death of a Discipline”. A more recent work, done with Butler had been released a few years ago. The title is “Who Sings the Nation?”
@Gabby D — Career U is one of those career-oriented for profit universities that has branches all over the United States and expanding to many other areas.
@FR — Salamat for commenting and welcome to the blog. I agree with you about the cooptation of area studies and other related institutions, and think that this is an area you could have really delved into in your digital colonialism post.There’s a ton of colonialist discourse on feminist blogs and other liberal blogs, and when this is pointed out to them, the reaction is usually not pretty.
@culturalcritic — Welcome to the blog, salamat for the reading suggestions. I’ll look into them. Spivak’s Other Asias is on my next pile of books to go through. I can’t believe how prolific she is, whereas I could hardly keep up with this blog. But we all benefit from her prolific-ness.
Spivak’s actually one of the more decent PC critics around; I prefer a Spivak to a Bhabha any day. I first encountered her many years ago (Subalter Cannot Speak essay). But then I realized, hey, I won’t be able to understand Spivak if I don’t go back to Marx. Thus began my reading tree, which took me back centuries; but the good thing is, I’m one of the few who actually went out of their way to read Marx himself. which i think is one of the few weaknesses of those who jump straight on to PC theory, lacanian psychoanalysis or what not.
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This has been the basic problem of Gayatri Spivak: Since she ascribes to the Derridean strategy of extrapolation, what seems to be very elusive for Spivak is that by having a deconstructive stance, the very radical, negative (to put the words of Hegel), are placed at bay, refuted by simply formulation of ideational permutations and the very potential ground, the locus of creations for the New, is foreclosed, missed or even prohibited to transform something into a new being.
We cannot simply embark on taking the struggle of controlling the transnational script, or simply befittingly reified by the presence of logocentric texts of the West! The very production of these texts, the scripts of the capital, is the same ground of radicality and contentions where one must plant the seeds of a revolution. These texts, commodities are the basic cells of capital and these could not be altered or differed by the precise moments of reconfiguring the discursive warfare! It is by taking the negative, the differed subjects of the current regime of the capital will be the agents in-itself to willfully pulverize the very system that they are subsumed under.
What Spivak seems not to note on reading Derrida is that he is a Philosopher of the possibility: that by deconstructing and threshing out the very fabric of every sign, signified, in the very linguistic order that one is implicated in, it is also provenance of posing ontological exegesis and criticism. And what Derrida missed is that, in that precise moment of capturing the very inherent limit and the finite limite of possibility where the impossible is delineated, it has to be faced with bravery and radicality that it has to be embraced and traversed the very same ground of limitations of the possibility.
Salamat sa comment, missphilippines, and welcome to the blog. I’m still thinking about what you wrote, especially in terms of radicality and altering transnational scripts. But just quickly, what I appreciate in Spivak, Bhabha, Said, and Fanon is that their work goes towards challenging the way that postcolonial subjects are hailed. My biggest issue with liberatory, teleological movements from Christianity to Marxism is that there are already set ways of hailing and representing the subjects (because “they can’t represent themselves” and all that). But these transnational scripts, while commodities of capital (at least now), also provide opportunities to insert ourselves into the discourse, of changing the ways that subjects are hailed. [still more thoughts, still thinking]